Microsoft’s Major Nelson Answers Questions About Xbox One

Larry Hryb, better known to many in the gaming community as Major Nelson recently spoke out on Reddit to answer many of the big questions that he was asked, covering the subject of multimedia playback, HTML, flash memory and more.

When asked if we will be able to playback our own media files, much like we can on the Xbox 360 over network and from external USB devices he said he can’t confirm anything, but he did go on to say that the Xbox One engineers want the system to b ea total media device, so it stands to reason that it will play back files in a similar fashion. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what codecs are supported.

I know many people in the gaming community are curious about their current headsets being compatible with the new controllers. Larry said that the new headset adapter is “being worked on” and that they will have some new information on that soon.

The new web browser should be pretty good too and while I’m not a fan of web browsing from my console it’s good to know that it will have full HTML5 support, as well as Flash functionality, so there should be very few (if any) major websites and online functions that do not work at launch. Although this should also be supplemented by stand alone apps such as Facebook and YouTube.

Weirdly, he was unable to answer what the extra 8GB of flash memory was for, stating “no idea, yet. I’m sure he [sic] can can elaborate as more info comes in from the engineers.” I’m personally guessing this is much like the 4GB Xbox 360 model, some internal memory that is independent of the hard drive, likely for providing quick storage to the multitude of applications, the OS, video streams and more… but that is only my personal guess.